Keep Calm and Carry On was a motivational poster produced by the British government in 1939 in preparation for the Second World War. The poster was intended to raise the morale of the British public, threatened with widely predicted mass air attacks on major cities.

Last Friday the UK population decided to exit Europe. A sad day. Not because of the economical repercussions, not because of the immigration debate but simply because, we now have a broken European continent, in which a poster like the one above could make a re-appearance. The basis of Europe was to avoid wars. Now there is a greater probability tomorrow than there was yesterday.

Most Leave campaigners, some of my friends, were jubilant and shouting “we have our country back”. My question to them all is at what cost. Are they prepared for years of austerity? (strongly dismissed by my Leave friends). The pound will be close to parity, oil prices are going up, inflation is around the corner and jobs will be cut. The other main argument is Europe is costing us too much money. Of course it is. The UK like France and Germany high the high earners and therefore must contribute accordingly. Now most Leave campaigners I have met or heard say that it is not fair. Well my response is always the same. You live in a society. Do the 1% of UK citizens earning more than a £100k are happy to have to pay more tax than the others for no added value benefits? of course not. But I don’t hear 99% of the population saying it is not fair. So why at a macro level point of view it is suddenly unfair for the UK to contribute more than lets say Poland?

My belief is that UK citizens should never have been allowed to vote on such a crucial matter (but one would argue that this referendum is not legally binding). This is why you have politicians, that understand better the political and economical repercussions (would a CEO ask his employees their opinion when defining a strategy?). This vote should go to the house of Commons. People have been sold a dummy and Boris is getting what he wants, the PM hot seat. It is the same man that wrote just two years ago that the EU had ‘helped to deliver a period of peace and prosperity for its people’. Smooth Boris!

As a pro European I woke up a minority but I can’t help believe that in 2 years time, I may just be in a majority, unless of course, if I will be shipped backed to Britanny in a Farage’s container. By the way, just a note on immigration, there are more Irish living in the UK  674,786 people in England (1.4 per cent of the population) than any other European countries (https://fullfact.org/europe/immigration-and-eu-referendum/). Really looking forward to the immigration policies. On a more serious note, no one can fully predict the future, but was the risk worth taking? Maybe we should have done a decision tree.

Finally, if there is some positive out of it, it is that I hope it will shake other European countries and lead to a review on how Europe is being ruled. There are clearly a lot of issues to tackle and some excellent points raised by the Leave campaigners. I just hope that Brussels won’t dismiss the issues.

Benoit Mercier